DemocracyNow reports that the Iraqis have always known what this war is about:

In one of the first studies of Iraqi public opinion after the US-led invasion of March 2003, the polling firm Gallup asked Iraqis their thoughts on the Bush administration’s motives for going to war. One percent of Iraqis said they believed the motive was to establish democracy. Slightly more – five percent – said to assist the Iraqi people. But far in the lead was the answer that got 43 percent - “to rob Iraq”s oil.”

The Iraqi parliament is soon expected to pass a new law, variously called “the oil law.   It seems “almost no one has been given access to the final version approved by the Iraqi Oil Committee.”

Writing for The Humanist, Kenneth Anderson, a scientist living in Baltimore, puts the cards on the table:  “Despite lofty talk of freedom and democracy, the true nature of the Iraq war may very well lie in the Iraqi oil law.”  The terms do seem to be extortionist.   According to Anderson:

The law as detailed in that draft is highly unusual for the Middle East, where other countries outlaw granting foreign companies direct interest in oil production. Under this draft hydrocarbon law, major Western oil companies would be granted Production Sharing Agreements (PSAs) for up to thirty years and, in at least the first few years, would reap up to 75 percent of the profits from both developed and undeveloped oil fields. Key to these PSAs is that they would be “locked in” regardless of the government in power.

The profit margin set out in the July draft is unconscionable and we can only assume which interested party suggested such a lopsided deal. To award foreign oil companies most of the oil profits at a time when the people of Iraq would need it most could rightly be described as sociopathic plutocracy. . .

U.S. senators appeared to be just as sheltered. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 11 regarding the proposed troop “surge,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was questioned about the law. “You referred to the oil law as a remarkable law,” Senator John Sununu (R-NH) told Rice. “Well, it’s the most remarkable law that no one has ever really seen.”

Though then-Secretary of State Colin Powell explicitly said in July 2003: “We did not do it for oil,” the draft oil law casts a very long, very dark shadow across those words . . .

Bush has stated quite clearly that troops won’t be withdrawn while he is in office. This is perhaps the most believable statement he has ever made.

Recent comments in response to posts on Dangerous Intersection have led me to write this screed.  Screed is to be the operative word for this, for it has been born out impatience and anger.  The biggest danger we face in the long run is the basic ignorance people bring to the political discourse.  If we lose our freedoms, it will not be to some tyrannical coup pulled off by a malicious politician, but because we ourselves collectively will no longer know what the hell we’re about.

Remembering my own school days, I cannot say that the situation presently is worse–we all have a tendency to misremember our youth, claim it to be better or worse, but the only thing we can say about it is that it was differently oriented–because most of my peers did not care a bit for history then.  They plodded through their classes, primary interest focused on their own immediate desires and needs, and who cared what happened before they were born?  What has changed is that as the world shrinks and becomes daily more pressing, the buffers that protected us in our ignorance no longer operate as efficiently or even in the same way.  One of the things that makes modern foreign entanglements more significant for the individual is that the cause and effect loop is faster, more immediate, and more threatening.  Therefore, when something begs for understanding and we look to the past for examples and counterexamples, it will not do to simply trust our leaders.  Nor will it do to have merely a Hollywood understanding of the past. 

I expect this will change nothing.  But I am annoyed.

World War II is used often as a touchstone for military adventurism and the necessity of strong foreing policy.  It is also used to excuse present-day actions, to make comparisons of situations then and now, and to validate decisions taken which seem  to bear some resemblence to the past.

But the people who do this the most seem rarely to know what they’re talking about.

The world was in fact very different and America substantially so.  Let me go down a list of why comparisons–specifically between the present Middle East conflict and WWII–are simply not supportable.

One:  the entire globe was struggling to emerge from economic depression.  We personalize the Great Depression here.  An American calamity.  It was bad here, very bad, but our hagiography about our nation’s past tends to blind us to the fact that entire planet was screwed up then.  The world was in depression in the aftermath of the first world war.  The emergence of the facsist states was directly related to this central fact.  They were in many ways economic movements. They didn’t work, they depended on pillage, hence the expansionist aspect to all the fascist regimes with the exception of Spain, which was only partly facsist in the economic sense.

One thing this meant for America at the time is that we enjoyed no clear superiority economically to any other nation.  We did, in fact, have more potential, and the fundamental vitality of our economic prior to 1929 softened–yes, softened–the onset of depression somewhat, but it hamstrung us in ways that make comparisons to the present-day situation absurd.  Furthermore, no one was sure then that capitalism would survive.  We really forget this one.  The global depression put that in doubt in ways we can’t imagine now.

Two:  Along with all the other problems, we had no significant military.  Not even here.  We forget today that one of the central tenets of America since the revolution was a profound distrust of standing armies of any kind.  After WWI, we stood down.  The fleet was aging, infantry were poorly trained an equipped, and numbers were low.  WWI resulted in no occupation by us of anything significant.

Three:  There was no CIA.  Or anything even close to it.  We had embassies and some embassies employed spies, usually locals, and there were a few spies employed by the government, but this was also antithetical to our vision of ourselves.  Spying grew during WWI, but Calvin Coolidge shut it down.  His secretary of state–I forget his name–closed down Room 14 with the famous saying “Gentlemen don’t read other people’s mail.”  The branches of the military had small intelligence units, but there was NOTHING like today’s CIA, NIA, or other intelligence organizaitons.  We did not have the information-gathering capacity in any way shape or form, and even if we did, there was little we could have done with any of it.  The so-called “super powers” of the day were Britain, France, Russia to some extent (although they were rabidly isolationist modern myths to the contrary–the Soviet threat we came to know and love developed after WWII), and the U.S., but Britain pretty much dominated the international scene.

Four: The technology of the day was, with certain exceptions, 19th Century.  Gasoline and diesel power had replaced coal in many ways (for shipping, that is) but by and large, WWII started out as a 19th Century war.  It also started out as a war among relative equals.

I could go on, but just those fundamental differences should show that comparisons cannot be made but in the most careful ways, and generally not at all. WWII was a kind of war which we may never see again.  Saddam Hussein was not Hitler.  The closest thing we have to that kind of dictator today is in North Korea, and he is incapable of doing much more than rattle his chains, his much discussed nuclear program notwithstanding.  The social and political and economic circumstances that to the emergence of Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan no longer pertain.  It’s both simpler and more complex than that, but in any event it is different.  An Osama Bin Laden could not have done then what he has done today, just as an emergent Hitler could not do today what he did then.

This is important, because we have a habit in this country of eulogizing and sacrilizing the past in such a way as to argue current policy points with the underlying assumption that what we did then cna apply now.  Sometimes it can, but for the most part things have changed too much for valid comparisons.  It leads us to presume before understanding, and that has led us into a horrid mess which bears virtually no comparison to anything we did in the past or had to face.

We need to get over that habit if we’re going to find viable solutions to future problems, and that means we better stop treating history–collectively–like a font of sacred text or that boring stuff about dead people.

End of screed.

Last week I attended a panel at The Tank in New York City, where Ari Melber of The Nation, Democratic strategist Scott Shields, and erstwhile John Edwards blogger Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon were giving a talk on progressive politics, netroots political activism, and how to combat the right-wing noise machine. (Majikthise has pictures for the interested - scroll down to March 4.)

The conference was attended by about seventy-five people, and of those, I’d conservatively estimate that 100% had their own blogs. I know this because everyone who asked a question made sure to mention the name of theirs. (Little bit of self-deprecating blog humor there! - although, in my defense, I didn’t ask anything). Really, this shouldn’t be a surprise; if we didn’t think there were others who were interested in what we had to say, we wouldn’t write for our blogs in the first place. The evening ended up being more like a conversation than a question-and-answer session, not that there’s anything wrong with that - although I could have done with a little less of the obligatory Kos-bashing.

In any case, I wanted to write about some thoughts that’ve been brewing in my mind on one of the evening’s themes. Amanda Marcotte in particular, recently retired from the John Edwards campaign after becoming a target of intense harassment and vituperation from bigots like William Donohue, spoke on the silly and pointless cult of apology that’s become one of the favorite tactics of the right-wing noise machine. The general theme is that, whenever a progressive does something that annoys conservatives, they and often everyone around them are subjected to a barrage of demands to “apologize”. This is not so much a request for a heartfelt expression of regret as much as it is a demand that the offender ritually abase themselves before the self-appointed guardians of decency and seek pardon for transgressing what those self-appointed guardians view as the bounds of acceptable discourse. Liberals do this too, but conservatives are particularly enamored of it.

The endless and insincere demands for apologies have grown to become one of the aspects of politics that annoys me the most. As Marcotte pointed out, what it’s really about is flexing political muscle and attempting to humiliate one’s enemies - along the lines of “I made you apologize, so therefore I am strong and you are weak”. The apology, if given, is not viewed as an expression of regret that clears the air, but merely an admission of guilt that can be more readily used to attack the giver in the future.

All of this came up in a discussion of the vote authorizing the Iraq war, which several Democratic presidential candidates voted in favor of - in particular Hillary Clinton. John Edwards, who was also in the Senate at the time, has publicly said “I was wrong” to cast that vote. Clinton, on the other hand, refuses to issue an apology and says that people who want her to admit that should choose another candidate, though she says that “if I knew then what I know now”, she wouldn’t have voted for the war.

As I said, I am no fan of the cult of apology, and I have not yet made up my mind which candidate I intend to support. But I’m very near certain that whichever one it is, it won’t be Hillary Clinton, and her stance on this issue is the reason why. This may seem to be a contradiction with the previous paragraphs, so permit me to explain myself.

Unlike conservatives who glorify a contrived cult of masculinity, I view apologizing not as proof of the giver’s ritual humiliation, but as a way for them to demonstrate what they have learned. It is appropriate in that context, when an opportunity for learning presents itself. To me, Hillary Clinton’s refusal to apologize for her vote authorizing war is evidence that she hasn’t learned anything.

Granted, she has said that she wouldn’t have voted for war if she had known then what she knows now. But what sort of statement is that? If she had known in advance that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, had nothing to do with September 11 and was bound to fall apart in a bloody civil war in the aftermath of invasion, she wouldn’t have voted to invade? I would certainly hope so! But that isn’t a bold declaration of political principle; that is just proof of some minimal connection to reality. That should be the bare minimum required for any candidate who wants to be taken seriously. But it does not go nearly far enough.

In essence, by refusing to apologize, Clinton is asserting that Iraq isn’t her fault. She wants to place all the blame on Bush for feeding misinformation to Congress, and none on herself for being taken in by that misinformation. That is not how our government works. Congress is not a rubber stamp, blindly considering only the information which the president wants them to consider and then obediently voting however the president wants. Congress is a separate and co-equal branch of government, and as such has not just the right but the obligation to exert its own authority by skeptically and critically scrutinizing any action the president wishes to take, and denying him the authority to take that action if the evidence does not hold up. In the runup to the war, unfortunately, Congress was taken in by hysteria and chose to abdicate that responsibility.

Yes, Bush bears the vast majority of the blame for lying and misleading this country into a bloody, disastrous war. But Congress is not free of blame either. Every member of Congress who voted to authorize that action bears a share of the blame as well. They can expiate that guilt in two ways. First, they should immediately introduce legislation to bring American soldiers home as soon as is reasonably possible. Second, at least as importantly, they should apologize forthrightly for their blind recklessness to lead us into war on dubious evidence in the first place. Again, this is not about ritual humiliation: it is about these congresspeople telling us what they have learned. They must prove to us that they now recognize Congress as a co-equal branch of government, one which has the authority and the obligation to act as a brake on the executive, and will not be blindly led into disaster by a warmongering president again. Hillary Clinton’s refusal to apologize, her refusal to shoulder her portion of the blame for the Iraq disaster, suggests to me that she has not learned anything at all from her part in this.

Such good irony.

I can’t help but shake my head at the many Christians who are temporarily putting on their Skeptic Hats to deal with a bold claim by a Discovery Channel documentary.  That documentary is claiming that a tomb discovered in Israel in 1980 held the bones of Jesus.   If true, the documentary’s claim would conflict with the alleged resurrection of Jesus.

[Note: there is controversy about the resurrection, based upon the original writings from the Gospel according to Mark]

Ebonmuse, an atheist, has pointed out many reasons to doubt the claims of the television documentary that the tomb discovered in 1980 was the tomb of Jesus.  He concludes:

I believe the most likely scenario is that this is a genuine tomb from biblical times, containing several ordinary people with names common from the time, which has been hyped beyond what the evidence supports by overzealous filmmakers trying to create a sensation. It is not a magic bullet to destroy Christianity . . .

Based upon the points raised in his article, I agree Ebonmuse.  For those same reasons, I agree with the many Christians who are now attacking the Discovery Channel documentary. There are, indeed, many good reasons to doubt these claims. It’s fun to engage in skeptical inquiry, marching side-by-side with devout Christian believers for a change!

No sooner are they finished criticizing the claim about the tomb of Jesus, though, you can hear many of these same believers asserting, as undeniable facts, all of those ancient “truths” of their own religions, those tenuous claims they do believe.  According to many Christians, we simply know that Jesus performed each of the miracles described in the Gospels.  We must not doubt that Mary floated into heaven.  And we are absolutely certain that Jesus never had sex with Mary Magdalene (I’ve sometimes heard Believers assert “He just wouldn’t have done that . . . ”). 

All of these claims, however, are based on uncorroborated and incomplete ancient writings by unknown authors, most of weren’t even witnesses to these incredible (alleged) events that they report. Many of these claims conflict with other passages from the same sacred writings. Often, the claims of Believers are based on nothing at all (e.g., what hell is really like, how God deals with unbaptised babies or whether Mary was really one of King David’s descendants).  All of this unbudging belief, when there is legitimate doubt about whether a man named Jesus ever really existed at all–Christian writers completely failed to even mention the life or miracles of Jesus of Galilee for more than 40 years following his alleged death (see “The Jesus Puzzle” and here). (more…)

If you want to sleep well and not worry about Bush’s new plans for the Middle East, don’t read this New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh: “The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” 

Here’s the story of one marine.

The comments following this video at YouTube substantiate the huge cultural divide that exists in the U.S.

The comment that haunts me the most is about the day-to-day job: breaking down doors and terrorizing numerous innocent people. This occurs because our soldiers can’t tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys–the bad guys don’t have “Bad Guy” stamped on their foreheads. And our soldiers are asked to make these wild guesses day after day after day. It’s like asking a brain surgeon to remove a brain tumor when he or she can’t tell the difference between the “good” cells and the “bad” cells. Would you proceed with surgery in that scenario?

Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), the organization to which this marine belongs, was founded “to give a voice to the large number of active duty service people and veterans who are against this war, but are under various pressures to remain silent.” IVAW stands for:

• Immediate withdrawal of all occupying forces in Iraq;
• Reparations for the destruction and corporate pillaging of Iraq so that ordinary Iraqi people can control their own lives and future; and
• Full benefits, adequate healthcare (including mental health), and other supports for returning servicemen and women.

For more about what it’s like on the ground, consider this interview of Paul Rieckhoff by Keith Olbermann. We’ve written about Paul Rieckhoff before. He authored Chasing Ghosts after serving a tour of duty in Iraq. Paul, who I met at the 2007 National Conference for Media Reform in Memphis, now heads the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

Chomsky wrote that it all has to do with corporate power and oil.  Here is an excerpt from The Independent, an article entitled “The US says it is fighting for democracy - but is deaf to the cries of the Iraqis”  

Sovereignty in Iraq might well lead to a loose Shia alliance controlling most of the world’s petroleum resources and independent of the US, undermining a primary goal of US foreign policy since it became the world-dominant power after the Second World War. Worse yet, though the US can intimidate Europe, it cannot intimidate China, which blithely goes its own way, even in Saudi Arabia, the jewel in the crown - the primary reason why China is considered a leading threat. An independent energy bloc in the Gulf area is likely to link up with the China-based Asian Energy Security Grid and Shanghai Cooperation Council, with Russia (which has its own huge resources) as an integral part, and with the Central Asian states (already members), possibly India. Iran is already associated with them, and a Shia-dominated bloc in the Arab states might well go along. All of that would be a nightmare for US planners and their Western allies.

There are, then, very powerful reasons why the US and UK are likely to try in every possible way to maintain effective control over Iraq. The US is not constructing a palatial embassy, by far the largest in the world and virtually a separate city within Baghdad, and pouring money into military bases, with the intention of leaving Iraq to Iraqis. All of this is quite separate from the expectations that matters can be arranged so that US corporations profit from the vast riches of Iraq.

These topics, though high on the agenda of planners, are not within the realm of discussion, as can easily be determined. That is only to be expected. These considerations violate the fundamental doctrine that state power has noble objectives, and while it may make terrible blunders, it can have no crass motives and is not influenced by domestic concentrations of private power. Any questioning of these Higher Truths is either ignored or bitterly denounced, also for good reasons: allowing them to be discussed could undermine power and privilege.

Here is Chomsky’s practical proposal  “work to change the domestic society and culture substantially enough so that what should be done can at least become a topic for discussion.”

You can read about it here, The Daily Times of Pakistan:

ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court was moved on Tuesday against recent legislation allowing one-dish meals at weddings, with the contention that the law had reopened the door to wasteful expenses and weddings had become a financial burden for most people of the country.

The 22-page constitutional petition, filed by lawyer Tariq Aziz, said that rich people were blatantly violating the one-dish law. It said that this started happening only after parliament approved the one-dish bill and amended the Marriage Functions (Prohibition of Ostentatious Display and Wasteful Expenses) Ordinance 2000.

Before this amendment, there was a complete ban on serving food at weddings, and hosts could only serve hot or cold drinks, but on September 18, a law was passed under which a one-dish meal of curry, rice, roti bread and dessert could be served at weddings and related functions.

When I first read this article, I shook my head, thinking it was all so silly.  But then I remembered what I had recently written about consumer excesses in America,  excesses that are so prevalent that we now need to stop and squint to see the obvious.

Could it be that rather than a narrow-minded debate about ossified rituals, the Supreme Court that is holding the line in Islamabad is wisely squelching the beginnings of a beast that grew (yes, thousands of times beyond these meagre beginnings in Pakistan) to ensnarl so much of America with so many “needs” that we don’t really need.

Question: Are opulent American weddings any more meaningful than Pakastani weddings?  Similarly, are opulent American weddings any more meaningful than the pared-down American weddings held in the woods with a dozen close friends and a total food budget of $20?

Did you see Virginia Sen. Jim Webb’s response to the President’s State of the Union address last night?  Here’s the text.

The President took us into this war recklessly. He disregarded warnings from the national security adviser during the first Gulf War, the chief of staff of the army, two former commanding generals of the Central Command. . .and many, many others with great integrity and long experience in national security affairs. We are now, as a nation, held hostage to the predictable - and predicted - disarray that has followed.

And what about the recent remarks of Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska?

“There is no strategy,” he said of the Bush administration’s war management. “This is a pingpong game with American lives. These young men and women that we put in Anbar province, in Iraq, in Baghdad are not beans; they’re real lives. And we better be damn sure we know what we’re doing, all of us, before we put 22,000 more Americans into that grinder.”

A Vietnam veteran, he fairly lectured fellow senators not to duck a painful debate about a war that has grown increasingly unpopular as it has gone on. “No president of the United States can sustain a foreign policy or a war policy without the sustained support of the American people,” Hagel said.

Until recently, the Administration and it’s many supporters (where did most of them go) slammed people who raised the above sorts of concerns as traitorous and unpatriotic. Why?  Because Bush’s (former) supporters said so. Lazy and seeking imminent satisfaction, like toddlers, they didn’t want to do the intellectual ground work.  Their reach was, indeed, greater than their grasp.

Have we learned anything about the importance of vigorously questioning our leaders?  I think that many of us have.  Many of us have learned that huddling together like timid sheep is danagerous and stupid. Many have learned that we are stonger when we treat the voices of sincere criticism with respect.  After all, if those critics are wrong, we should be able to explain why without venom; once we do this, they’ll join us.  If those critics are correct, though, we need to publicly acknowledge those criticisms and change our ways. For our own good.

Perhaps it’s because the lessons we’ve learned about communicating are so patently obvious that the President is bypassing communication alltogether in his secret dealings with Iran. 

What concerns me about Iran is that (I fear) decisions are being made without any meaningful public discussion.  Unlike Iraq, where the Administration duped America, we are edging toward disaster with Iran in silence, repeatedly provoking Iran to make the first move. The American public is not being asked what they think about going to war with Iran. 

So here’s the biggest lesson our President learned from Iraq:  When no one knows what you’re up to, there’s no critics to paint as unpatriotic.  Problem solved.

The American public has a friend in Ed Markey, the Massachusetts’ representative who is the now the Chairman and the highest-ranking Democrat of the House Subcommittee on Telecomunications and the Internet.

Markey knows media well. This video is proof. He knows that the telephone companies have one full-time lobbyist in Washington DC for each member of Congress. He knows that we are up against big corporate money in the fight to keep the Internet available for all providers and all consumers of information.

He’s a big advocate of network neutrality. He commends the bourgeoning movement of grass roots citizens who have stepped up to defend the Internet with massive demonstrations of support. He speaks with vigor against media consolidation. BTW, check out this study showing the bogus arguments the big telecoms make in their attempts to justify further consolidation.

Markey speaks in support of the many forms of alternative media and he recognizes the power and accomplishments of blogs (here’s one recent example).

He’s the right guy at the right time and the right place.

President Bush is going to send more than 20,000 more troops into Iraq and spend billions of more dollars to carry on a hideous war.  Why?  To protect Americans from terrorists, he tells us.  Bush convinced Americans to invade Iraq by accusing Iraq of being responsible for the 9/11 attacks that killed 3,000 Americans.  This argument suggests that the deaths of 3,000 people is a horrible thing.

Whenever 3,000 people die, it is a horrible thing.  It might justify hundreds of billions of dollars, though certainly not the diversion of money from programs that save equal numbers of lives. 3,000 deaths justifies the deaths of more than 3,000 soldiers, we are told.  I don’t agree with this. The political party that argues that there are clear moral rules (the Republicans) isn’t convincing me.

Does it make a difference that 3,000 innocent Americans die on the same day rather than over the course of a year?  I wouldn’t think so.  A death is a death, in my opinion.  And 3,000 deaths are 3,000 deaths.

Therefore, shouldn’t the 16,000 murders that occur every year in the US require a response five times bigger than the invasion of Iraq?   That’s 3,000 every ten weeks.  Shouldn’t it require focused efforts to protect these victims?  Shouldn’t it require a revamping of our entire criminal justice system, especially our prison system, which so often trains criminals to be even more vicious, rather than preparing them for ready for release? Where is our war on criminal violence? It is certainly justified by looking at the widespread death caused by murderers.

Or what should we do about a silent killer that kills 1,500 Americans every day.  That’s 3,000 every two days.  Shouldn’t that get our focused and unrelenting national attention?  Lance Armstrong discussed this killer today: cancer.  What are our leaders doing about cancer?  Worse than nothing. Listen to Armstrong, a cancer survivor who has dedicated his energies toward developing cures to cancer:

Cancer will impact one in two men and one in three women in their lifetime. It is devastating and it is pervasive. In fact, every year 1.3 million Americans are diagnosed with cancer.

The medical advances achieved by our nation’s best doctors and researchers have given us reasons to hope.  But in spite of this vast body of knowledge, 1,500 people will die from cancer today and tomorrow and the day after that, often because the care they needed to prevent cancer or survive it was not available to them.

However, our nation’s second-leading killer did not make the list of issues that our candidates used to get people to the polls last November. Anyone with a television or access to a newspaper can list the ballot box issues that occupied our candidates’ attention — they range from bickering to very real concerns and challenges.

The political ads didn’t tell voters that earlier in the year funding for cancer research was cut for the first time in 30 years. Nor did they explain that a lack of funding slows the pace of scientific discovery and the development of treatments. Our candidates did not mention the decrease in funding for programs that provide information and screening to people who need these services. I think this is unwise, but it is what our government has done this past year. I waited patiently for an explanation, some clarification or justification. Ten million cancer survivors deserve an answer. We didn’t get one.

[Emphasis added]. 

(more…)

According to ABC News, the White House and the Secret Service “quietly signed an agreement last spring in the midst of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal declaring that records identifying visitors to the White House are not open to the public.”  The agreement is in the form of a five-page document dated May 17 declaring that “all entry and exit data on White House visitors belongs to the White House as presidential records rather than to the Secret Service as agency records. Therefore, the agreement states, the material is not subject to public disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.”

Are we hiding the names of people with access to the President because we don’t want to embarrass the visitors?  No, it’s actually because we don’t want to embarrass the President by disclosing the people with whom he’s been spending time.

With whom has Bush been spending time?  Criminals like Jack Abramoff, who visited Bush in 2003 and–well, we don’t actually know when else, because this sort of information is secret.  Citizens for Reponsibility and Ethics In Washington (CREW) has just released the above photo. It’s a happy pose.  The expressions of Abramoff and Bush don’t evoke the spirit of Scott McClellan’s: “The President does not know him, nor does the President recall ever meeting him.”  If the President doesn’t really know Abramoff, this means that I can walk into the White House and arrange for Bush to pose like this with me too.

We don’t want any more photos like this, do we?  That would distract us from our so-called war on terror.

This question is misleading.  In 2003, approximately 40% of us opposed the invasion.   But it felt like there were only a handful of us.

I was looking through my 2003 writings to recall my rational for opposing the Iraq invasion.  I don’t see that I wrote anything much about Iraq back then.  I do remember thinking the invasion was a big mistake.  I do remember thinking that Colin Powell was blowing smoke at the U.N. 

Though I didn’t find much in writing from 2003, I found this 2004 email I wrote to a friend who was very much in favor of the war:

I’ve been working a lot of hours lately, but I can’t help but feel deep gnawing need to pry myself away periodically to do my small part to stop this insane movement that goes in the name of “conservatism.”  Squandering the budget is only one part of it for me.  Every day, this lunatic’s rhetoric and actions are causing 100 talented young men from the Middle East to dedicate their entire lives to lighting a nuclear fire so as to melt New York.  I truly believe that the short term temporary good that Bush has accomplished in the Middle East is far outweighed, not only by the blood spilled to accomplish it, but by the horrors we will be facing 10 and 20 years from now.  This country would never have gone to war had Bush and his team not bald-faced lied about the alleged urgent need to start this war. 

And now, a year later, he has no exit plan, and Rumsfeld is currently on TV denying that the administration ever claimed that the threat from Iraq was imminent.   We’re pouring huge amounts of money into Iraq’s infrastructure, material goods that, a few years from now (if not sooner), will be controlled entirely by zealots congealed into dysfunctional action by their hatred of the United States. 

Bernard Lewis’ book “What Went Wrong” details the ancient history of the Middle East:  there never has been a distinction between politics and religion there (except for Turkey, for which Turkey has been despised by most other Middle Eastern countries).  The current administration, in deep denial of the obvious social history of the region, lashed out to change all that by imposing a paper constitution on those angry folks, along with dozens of billions of dollars.  I’ve read enough history to know that this approach is fruitless and destructive to our own efforts.  The money we’re spending could have done great things in this country.

Re-reading this letter made me wonder how much of the country was actually in favor of the war in the months preceding the war.   I discussed this question with two co-workers today.  I thought I had read that 40% of U.S. citizens were against the invasion, but that seemed too high to us, in retrospect.  Back in 2003, people against the war seemed to be a rarity.  Were we actually so rare?

Wikipedia has an article pertaining to the changing attitudes of the U.S. public from 2003 to the present, though the article lacks citations to some key statistics.

• According to Wikipedia, at about the time Bush gave his 2003 State of the Union address “Most polls showed that support for the invasion, depending on how the question is phrased, was at between 55-65% (58% according to CNN/USA Today, 57% according to the LA Times, and 67% according to Fox).” (more…)

We’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, right?  Our newly deceased former president, Gerald Ford, will now be turned into some kind of hero.  That’s the role of the media–to say happy things to put us in the mood to buy the products they advertise.  Therefore, the media is already busy touting Ford’s alleged role as a “healer” for his post Watergate service.

But now what have we here?   Today we learn that Ford sat on his hands while the current president lied us into war in Iraq.  It’s clear as day, according this article published by the Washington Post.  Here’s an excerpt:

Former president Gerald R. Ford said in an embargoed interview in July 2004 that the Iraq war was not justified. “I don’t think I would have gone to war,” he said a little more than a year after President Bush had launched the invasion advocated and carried out by prominent veterans of Ford’s own administration.

In a four-hour conversation at his house in Beaver Creek, Colo., Ford “very strongly” disagreed with the current president’s justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as sanctions, much more vigorously. In the tape-recorded interview, Ford was critical not only of Bush but also of Vice President Cheney — Ford’s White House chief of staff — and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who served as Ford’s chief of staff and then his Pentagon chief.

“Embargoed,” eh?  Isn’t that a euphemism for lacking the courage of one’s convictions?  A euphemism for cowardice?

The Ford interview — and a subsequent lengthy conversation in 2005 — took place for a future book project, though he said his comments could be published at any time after his death.  

So congratulations, President Ford, for failing to speak up at a time when you could have helped to save hundreds of thousands of lives.  Instead, you sat on your hands so that you didn’t embarrass your fellow republicans.  You and hundreds of other people who could have made a difference.  But didn’t.  For no good reason.

That’s unpardonable.

I was recently discussing the Iraq war with a political lobbyist friend of mine when he mentioned something I had not previously considered:  neocons and other law-and-order conservatives try to justify the Iraq invasion by saying that even though Saddam didn’t have WMDs, he was defying UN-mandated inspections of Iraqi facilities; therefore, Saddam was breaking the “law” and needed to be brought to account.  Then my friend challenged me:  “How would you answer that argument?” 

Here is my reply:

First, let’s remember that the UN-mandated inspections of Iraq’s facilities were based, as was Bush’s invasion, on lies and empty accusations that Saddam had WMDs.  The Bush Administration accused Saddam of having WMDs and then demanded that Saddam prove he didn’t have them.  Saddam didn’t have them, so what was he supposed to do?  He, in fact, allowed the inspections for a long time until, eventually, he became uncooperative.

Now, let’s think about his situation.  Imagine you are in your own home and the police come to your door one day insisting you have illegal weapons in your home and demanding to inspect your house.  The police were ordered there by the police chief, who happens to hate you because, ten years ago, you were in a fight with his father that contributed to his father losing his job, while you kept yours.  The police chief has held a grudge against you ever since.

You tell the police at your door that you have no illegal weapons in your house, but, of course, they have orders to inspect anyway.  So, you let the police do their inspection.  They find nothing and they leave.

A week later, the police show up again, with the exact same accusation and the exact same demand to inspect your house.  Again, you let them do their inspection, a bit annoyed this time because they were just there a week ago with the same phony accusation.  Again, they find nothing and, again, they leave.

A week later, they show up again.  This time, you are annoyed.  The police chief is obviously just harrassing you, and you don’t like it.  Nevertheless, you let the police do their inspection and, again, they find nothing and leave.

A week later, they show up again.  In fact, these pointless inspections go on for months until, finally, you get fed up with the police harrassment.  You refuse to allow the police to inspect your house anymore, because they are just wasting your time.  Immediately, the police chief declares, “Aha!  SEE!  He is refusing to allow inspections, because he must be hiding illegal weapons!”

When you continue to refuse the inspections, the police chief then screams, “SEE!  The inspections are NOT WORKING!  He MUST be hiding illegal weapons.  We must invade his house to disarm him!”

Sound familiar?  This is how George Bush (and Dick Cheney) sold Saddam up the river and sold America a costly, unnecessary war. 

Thus, to answer my friend’s question:  Saddam’s refusal to allow ongoing UN inspections did not justify America’s invasion, because the UN mandate was based on fraud and harrassment.  White House neo-cons wanted a fight, so they did what all smart bullies do:  when you want to start a fight and you want the other side to appear at fault, the best way to pick that fight is to annoy the other side until they get fed up and do something to provoke you, so you can then slug them and claim they started it.

Think Progress contrasts Laura Bush’s recent argument that the media are failing to report all of the good things that are happening to this excerpt from the Iraq Study Group:

In addition, there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq. The standard for recording attacks acts as a filter to keep events out of reports and databases…For example, on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals.

This excerpt is discussed in this separate Think Progress post, which is based on this article from the Washington Post.

It makes me wonder whether anyone is buything this line of bull anymore.  I wonder how the families of the soldiers killed in Iraq are reacting to this lie these days.  Maybe it gives some of them solace, because the alternative would be so incredibly crushing.

My thoughts?  Good-bye.  Good riddance. 

Vanity Fair has published an extraordinary article including interviews with many architects of America’s foreign policy.  What do they think now that Iraq has been such a miserable failure?

Varying degrees of regret can be detected in the people interviewed, but little remose, except from Kenneth Adelman:

Fearing that worse is still to come, [Kenneth] Adelman believes that neoconservatism itself—what he defines as “the idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of morality, the idea of using our power for moral good in the world”—is dead, at least for a generation. After Iraq, he says, “it’s not going to sell.” And if he, too, had his time over, Adelman says, “I would write an article that would be skeptical over whether there would be a performance that would be good enough to implement our policy. The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can’t execute it, it’s useless, just useless. I guess that’s what I would have said: that Bush’s arguments are absolutely right, but you know what? You just have to put them in the drawer marked CAN’T DO. And that’s very different from LET’S GO.”

That constant din in the background of most of the other interviews is blame directed toward the President for poorly executing the what the neocon architects still consider policy.  Reading between the lines, you know that they’d like another crack at it if they can ever come to power again.  Here are a few excerpts:

If not for the administration’s incompetence, [neocons] say, Saddam’s tyranny could have been  replaced with something not only better but also secure. “Huge mistakes were made,” Richard Perle says, “and I want to be very clear on this: they were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened, and certainly almost no voice in what happened after the downfall of the regime in Baghdad. I’m getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war. I was in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody said, ‘Go design the campaign to do that.’ I had no responsibility for that.”

Here is an excerpt from the interview of Frank Gaffney, president of the hawkish Center for Security Policy, which has close ties with the upper echelons of the Pentagon.

Gaffney describes the administration as “riven,” arguing that “the drift, the incoherence, the mixed signals, the failure to plan this thing [Iraq] rigorously were the end product of that internal dynamic.” His greatest disappointment has been the lack of resolution displayed by Bush himself: “This president has tolerated, and the people around him have tolerated, active, ongoing, palpable insubordination and skulduggery that translates into subversion of his policies.… He doesn’t in fact seem to be a man of principle who’s steadfastly pursuing what he thinks is the right course,” Gaffney says. “He talks about it, but the policy doesn’t track with the rhetoric, and that’s what creates the incoherence that causes us problems around the world and at home. It also creates the sense that you can take him on with impunity.”

It is currently standard GOP policy to paint the Iraq war as a good idea that was poorly executed by an incompetent president.  An aggressive media would remind the GOP that few Republicans were speaking out against Bush’s Iraq policy itself when Saddam’s statue toppled or when Bagdad was looted non-stop.  They now want to have it both ways, by casting strategic blame despite their earlier silence at critical junctures.

The following words were delivered last night by Sen. Gordon Smith (a Republican from Oregon), a 10-year veteran of the Senate:

I, for one, am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up by the same bombs day after day. That is absurd. It may even be criminal . I cannot support that anymore . I believe we need to figure out how to fight the war on terror and to do it right. So either we clear and hold and build, or let’s go home.

There are no good options, as the Iraq Study Group has mentioned in their report. I am not sure cutting and walking is any better. I have little confidence that the Syrians and the Iranians are going to be serious about helping us to build a stable and democratic Iraq. I am at a crossroads as well. I want my constituents to know what is in my heart, what has guided my votes…

So let’s cut and run, or cut and walk, or let us fight the war on terror more intelligently than we have, because we have fought this war in a very lamentable way.

Those are my feelings. I regret them. I would have never voted for this conflict had I reason to believe that the intelligence we had was not accurate. It was not accurate, but that is history. Now we must find a way to make the best of a terrible situation, at a minimum of loss of life for our brave fighting men and women. So I will be looking for every opportunity to clear, build, hold, and win or how to bring our troops home.

Take a look at the front page of today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 

You can see the photo of an Iraqi man grieving over the body of his three-year-old daughter outside of the Baghdad hospital.  According to the paper, “the girl was killed and three other family members injured when they were caught in crossfire as clashes erupted between gunmen and US forces.”

The lead story starts with this assertion:

The situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating.  The current approach is not working, and the ability of the United States to influence events is diminishing.

This story line and this photograph clearly impugn the integrity of the United States.  Publishing such information is unpatriotic.  Or, at least, those are the sorts of things we’ve been told, until recently. 

It was always OK to publish pictures of our proud soldiers and our high-tech missiles taking off, of course.   It was up to Al Jazeera and the Europeans to publish pictures of what happened when those missiles exploded on the ground, however.  And when those non-American media sources published those photos of Iraqi civilian carnage, it infuriated “America.”  It’s not that American soldiers weren’t also credible witnesses to the civilian killings on the ground.   The evidence was there to be published, if anyone cared to know. 

For most of the past 3 1/2 years, the Post-Dispatch (along with most mainstream newspapers across the United States) did not publish pictures like this, certainly not in prominent places.  It simply wasn’t deemed news until recently.  Deemed news by whom?  That’s what this post is about.

It’s now okay to publish these sorts of articles and to put graphic pictures of dead and maimed civilians on the front page.  It’s not simply a matter that the topics of these stories and photos have suddenly become relevant.  What the Post-Dispatch is now showing is old news that has always been relevant, always compelling.  Tens of thousands of families have been devastated by deaths and injuries throughout this unjust and unholy war. 

Until now, we haven’t before seen photos like these on the front page because Iraqi civilian casualties were not deemed “proper” news.  Graphic portrayals of Iraqi civilian casualties are now “news” only because those holding political power are now finally voicing public concerns that President Bush’s war in Iraq is an abject catastrophe.  Those holding real political power can no longer think of ways to spin reality hard enough to fit the warped world views of our pathetic president.

This recent political blessing that it is now OK to show Americans photos of dead and wounded civilians in Iraq illustrates the real-life role of the mainstream media.  The mainstream media functions as a stenographer for those who wield political power. (more…)

A short and sobering post on Huffpo by Thomas De Zengotita.

I saw a bumper sticker the other day. “Caution: Christian On Board”

I thought, yeah, I’ll be careful. These days christians can be dangerous.

What follows may be a bit on the intolerant side, but I’m sometimes convinced our condemnation of intolerance makes us too unwilling to be simply impatient.  We “tolerate” a lot of nonsense because we don’t want to be accused of intolerance. 

Rumsfeld is gone now, and I’ve been thinking about unanswered questions, assumptions made on our behalf which led to a holy mess.  I remember when Abu Ghraib broke.  I’m thinking about the obscenities from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. People expressed shock, outrage. The president, Rumsfeld, the generals, they were all duly unhinged. They did not approve this. They did not order it or condone it. Congress has them answering questions now as to how such things could happen.

Frankly, the wrong questions were and are being asked. Senators wanted to know who to blame for either condoning it or for “allowing it to happen”–a phrase I find ludicrous in practical terms. It’s like the phrase you hear lawyers and legislators use, you know the one “You failed to do such and such.” Every time I hear that phrase I think “No he didn’t. He didn’t fail. To fail implies that at some point an attempt was made to do something. The attempt failed. He didn’t fail to tell the truth–he simply didn’t do it. He succeeded in not doing it. Failure was entirely part of getting caught. He failed to keep it secret.” Same goes for “allowing it to happen.” It implies a conscious choice. There was none. At least, most of the time–and if there was a conscious choice, then “allow” is the wrong word–”cause” would be the right word.

I was not surprised at Abu Ghraib. Shocked, sure, but that was a visceral reaction to ugliness. I’d been waiting for something like that to happen. And maybe in that respect, “allow” becomes more relevant. Maybe if Senator Kennedy et al asked Rumsfeld and the others “Didn’t you expect something like this given the culture of this administration?” then they would have been on the right track.

What has been “allowed” to happen, though, is something a bit deeper, a bit more insidious, and has profound historical roots.

In his superb history of Catholicism and anti-semitism, James Carroll writes in Constantine’s Sword: the Church and the Jews: “…Since the end of World War II, there have been the theological revolution of Vatican II, with its rejection of the deicide charge and its affirmation of God’s ongoing covenant with the Jewish people; the remarkable grass-roots flourishing of Jewish-Catholic dialogue; and the serious effort of the Polish pope to confront the legacy of Catholic anti-semitism, But there remain rigid lines drawn around beliefs that may not be changed and around questions that may not be asked. Already we have seen the deeply problematic legacy of Jew hatred in foundational Christian texts, in the implicitly anti-Jewish Christian idea of revelation as prophecy fulfillment, and most damaging of all, in the dominant Christian theology of Jesus, not only as the enemy of the Jewish people but as the son of God who obliterates the integrity of all other ways to God.”

The story Carroll tells is how the church hierarchy defined the status of Jews throughout the Middle Ages, starting from Augustine, as a people deserving of disrespect.  (more…)

I got riled up while reading the latest Utne Reader by an article by Keith Goetzman entitled “Houston, We Have a Problem“. He eloquently argues that we should stop wasting money on space research and spend it solving problems here on Earth.

Let’s look at the numbers. What fraction of a percent of our national budget is spent on space? NASA got about $16B in 2005 (including military allocations) out of $2,200B Federal revenues. That’s 0.72%, leaving only a paltry 99.28% to deal with problems here on Earth. I’m ignoring the record-high deficit spending that makes the NASA fraction even smaller. Look the numbers up yourselves. Check my assertions.

We could spend that little fraction on some other issues here at home. But how will we solve problems such as the next major asteroid impact? Yes, it will happen; we just won’t know when. How will we solve the problem of running out of {pick your resource}? Anything we need down here (or a reasonable substitute) can be found up there. After we build a space elevator, it would be cheaper to get it from up there than to dig it up here now! But, this project would necessarily be a crash program about as expensive as — and probably longer lasting than — a war in the middle east and it’s aftermath. Of course, the space elevator would employ a comparable number of people in a third world location that a hypothetical war on Iraq would kill for the same money.

(more…)

Michael Moore recently published this pledge in the Los Angeles Times.  I applaud each of these twelve points